Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography A New York Times Notable Book of
2022 * Vulture’s #1 Memoir of 2022 * A Washington Post Los Angeles Times USA TODAY Time
BuzzFeed Publishers Weekly Booklist and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year From
Chloé Cooper Jones—Pulitzer Prize finalist philosophy professor Whiting Creative Nonfiction
Grant recipient—an exquisite” (Oprah Daily) and groundbreaking memoir about disability
motherhood and the search for a new way of seeing and being seen.I am in a bar in Brooklyn
listening to two men my friends discuss whether my life is worth living.” So begins Chloé
Cooper Jones’s bold revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks
different than most. Jones learned early on to factor pain calculations” into every plan every
situation. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis which affects both her
stature and gait her pain is physical. But there is also the pain of being judged and pitied
for her appearance of being dismissed as less than.” The way she has been seen—or not seen—has
informed her lens on the world her entire life. She resisted this reality by excelling
academically and retreating to the neutral room in her mind” until it passed. But after
unexpectedly becoming a mother (in violation of unspoken social taboos about the disabled body)
something in her shifts and Jones sets off on a journey across the globe reclaiming the
spaces she’d been denied and denied herself. From the bars and domestic spaces of her life in
Brooklyn to sculpture gardens in Rome from film festivals in Utah to a Beyoncé concert in
Milan from a tennis tournament in California to the Killing Fields of Phnom Penh Jones weaves
memory observation experience and aesthetic philosophy to probe the myths underlying our
standards of beauty and desirability and interrogates her own complicity in upholding those
myths. Bold honest and superbly well-written” (Andre Aciman author of Call Me By Your Name)
Easy Beauty is the rare memoir that has the power to make you see the world and your place in
it with new eyes.
